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SPRING BREAK
Solid, early season south swell lights up West Coast
After four days of solid, early-season south swell in SoCal, all we can say is this: thank God for short memories.
Seriously.
The way SoCal surfers are walking around all smiling and sunburnt and noodled, you'd almost think we DIDN'T just endure the worst winter ever. An entire season of cross-training, riding weird boards in crap surf and sleeping through far too many hopeless down patrols evaporates with the first three-hour session in head high barrels. "Crappy Winter? What crappy winter? Did you see that last wave spit?"
While Orange County saw plenty of swell over the weekend, the dreaded Catalina Eddy effect kept the zone in annoying south winds and overcast skies. LA County, on the other hand, was cloudless and glassy, and the steeply angled swell made sure that all kinds of north LA County spots were firing, from Malibu on up.
"Zuma was firing," explained LA local Pascal Stanfield after a four-day tube-marathon. "Everyone was getting crazy barrels."
Unfortunately, it wasn't without consequence at Zuma. Longtime Dogtown local Jim 'Red Dog' Muir (Suicidal Tendencies' Mike Muir's brother) almost lost his life on Saturday after head-butting the super shallow sandbar. "He pulled into this really long barrel and was driving for a while," Stanfield remembers. "And he almost made it out, but where the left meets the right it's like three inches deep. It's almost dry."
According to witnesses, Muir hit the sandbar on his head and blacked out and was floating, face down, for two waves. Jesse Simons, Beau Bright and Michale Schwimmer pulled him out of the water and brought him to the beach, where lifeguards cut his wetsuit off and administered CPR. He was quickly helicoptered to the closest hospital.
Fortunately, Muir is recovering. "He had surgery on Monday and was walking around and moving his arms!" Longtime friend Strider Wasilewski explained. "He's in a halo brace but it looks good; turns out he cracked a vertebrae in his neck after head-butting the sandbar."
Apart from a few other minor injuries - mainly at Zuma - the only other casualties from this swell are relationships and jobs. Admittedly, though, SoCal surfers have been saving up sick days and hall passes since last October, so career and relationship damage was minimal.
Here's the forecaster breakdown, straight from ace CA forecaster Kevin Wallis:
"This recent run of south swell came about thanks to a pair of storms that spun up on the eastern half of the South Pacific about a week into March. They took similar tracks and were comparable in intensity with 35- to 50-knot wind recorded for both, although the second storm was better aimed at Baja and California.
"The end result is that it basically felt like one building and long-lasting swell starting on Saturday the 14th and now slowly fading as of this afternoon, Tuesday the 17th. And while this swell was much better aimed at South/Central America and Mainland Mexico (which were all very solid as the swell peaked in each respective region), Southern California also got in on the action with overhead waves at the top south-facing breaks of Orange County, North LA and a few select other spots."
Of course the official end of winter is next Saturday the 21st, but with a south swell like this - and possibly a - most SoCal surfers won't be sorry to see it go.
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March 17, 2009
